Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(59)

Hal wanted to go to Starbucks, but there was a little restaurant Gwen liked just off the square, so they went there instead. It was the day after Market Day, and the restaurant was quiet. They took a table at the back and ordered a pot of tea and a plate of scones.

“This place is changing,” Hal said when the waitress had brought their order. “A lot of people don’t think it’s for the better, either.”

Gwen liked the Community. It was her third visit this year, the first time on her own – Rudi had come with her the previous two times. There was something calm and quiet about the place which appealed to her. The countryside around the capital was beautiful and everyone was polite. Of course, the sexism here was breathtaking – there wasn’t a single woman on the Presiding Authority – and the last time she was here she’d overheard a shopkeeper quite openly referring to a visiting group of South African agricultural engineers as ‘niggers’, so there was that.

“They’re a conservative people,” Rudi said when she told him about it. “The only African people they know about are in books.”

“They need their f*cking heads banging together,” she said.

“Next time you’re in the countryside, stop and listen,” he told her. “No aeroplanes, no helicopters, no internal combustion. They still have steam trains. And they like it that way; it’s what they’ve been defending all these years.”

“So why open the borders?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“That’s what you get,” Gwen told Hal while she poured tea for them both. “You deal with the devil, you get burger franchises.”

He watched her. He was an unexceptional-looking man in his mid-fifties, with thinning hair and a neat grey beard. He wore a three-piece suit and a knitted tie. His shoes were beautifully hand-made. “I haven’t visited Europe,” he said.

“Well, you’re missing some stuff and not missing some other stuff,” she said. “I think you’d enjoy it.”

“Where are you from?”

“I’m from him,” she said. “And that’s all you need to know.”

He nodded. Gwen had no idea what Rudi’s relationship was with Hal; for operational reasons, she had no clear idea who Hal was. She had just been told to meet him on the steps of the Cathedral at a certain time and collect whatever he had for her. It was, Rudi had told her, a milk-run of a Situation, any stringer could handle it, although of course no stringer would ever be allowed near raw intelligence. She had a sneaking suspicion he wanted her out of Europe for the moment, while whatever was happening settled down, which was kind of annoying, but at least she was doing something useful instead of waitressing in that f*cking restaurant, and it was kind of exciting, espionage stuff. As on her previous visits, she was in local mufti, a skirt and jacket in heavy scratchy tweedy material over a starched white blouse and thick stockings, and a ridiculous little hat perched on top of her head and secured with hair grips. On the way to the meet, she had stopped off at a little stationers, bought a postcard depicting a village green in Ernshire – like a location for an old Miss Marple film – written a cheery ‘wish you were here’ on the back, and posted it to Lewis. Then she had headed to the Cathedral with a lightness in her heart.

“How is he, by the way?” asked Hal.

“He’s just fine and dandy,” she said, taking a scone from the plate in the middle of the table and slicing it neatly through the middle. “He sends his regards.” Hal had approached her outside the Cathedral exactly at the appointed time and identified himself by asking for a cigarette, to which she had replied that she no longer smoked. Rudi had called this a contact string, and she thought it was a bit silly, but he’d assured her that it was not, it was deadly serious.

Hal took a scone for himself, cut it in half, buttered one of the halves, added jam and cream. He said, “I wasn’t able to photograph the documents; there was no time.”

“Well, that’s not very good, Hal,” she said amiably.

“I did manage to read them,” he said. “I can tell you what you want to know.”

“I’m supposed to have documentary evidence, Hal,” she said, smearing butter on half of her scone. “You telling me stuff, well, that’s just you telling me stuff, isn’t it. You could be making it all up, for all I know.” She was also not supposed to know what intelligence she was being given; in a worst-case scenario, it could allow the Directorate to identify Hal.

“I’ve never let him down yet,” Hal protested.

“I never said you had,” she told him. She lowered her voice. “Look, if you think I’m going to debrief you in a tea shop you’ve got another think coming, mate.” Although she had a device in her tiny ugly excuse for a handbag, disguised as a fountain pen, which Rudi had told her would scramble any bugs the Directorate might have planted in the restaurant as part of the Community’s patient, plodding mass surveillance on its own people. “I just came here for a handover.”

“You’ll have to leave here empty-handed, then,” he said. He looked utterly pathetic, sitting there with half a scone in his hand. “There’s no way I can photograph those records.”

“Hal,” she said, “we’re not at home to no way today, are we?”